Mikhail Baryshnikov Quotes

Painting is the only universal language. All nature is creation's picture book. Painting alone can describe every thing which can be seen, and suggest every emotion which can be felt. Art reaches back into the babyhood of time, and is man's only lasting monument.

I'm inspired by art - in whatever form it takes. I love when I see a painting or a photograph that captures my attention.

If you scratch a great photograph, you find two things; a painting and a photograph.

Art is something that opens up and enhances your emotions and that's what I like to think I'm doing.

I don't think it's possible to touch people's imagination today by aesthetic means.

I like to write about painting because I think visually. I see my writing as blocks of color before it forms itself. I think I also care about painting because I'm not musical. Painting to me is not a metaphor for writing, but something people do that can never be reduced to words.

Good painting is like good cooking; it can be tasted, but not explained.

We're all going about trying to make beauty in the world and trying to make order out of chaos. And that's what art is.

I paint. I love the visual arts.

But I think that's a particular kind of experience involving a certain immediacy between you and the canvass, you and the particular kind of experience of that particular moment.

Painting is the most magical of mediums. The transcendence is truly amazing to me every time I go to a museum and I see how somebody figured another way to rub colored dirt on a flat surface and make space where there is no space or make you think of a life experience.

I try and take the photographs and paintings and make them real. And the real video we treat as paintings. We flip the reality.

Art - be it painting, sculpture, music - they are all creations, they are creative acts. I consider a film, with everything that is involved in it, an art.

I want to bring art into everything.

I don't see myself as a photographer. I still see the photographs and collages as a resource for the painting.

All I care about these days is painting — photography has never been more than a way into painting, a sort of instant drawing.

If I had been born one or two hundred years ago, I might have been a sculptor, but photography is a very quick way to see, to make sculpture.

I love art. It is uplifting.

Unlike the older, more humanly shaped arts, which begin with a seed and accumulate their form organically, photography clips its substance out of an actual continuum.

I'm not knocking conceptual art; it's another department, but it doesn't move me like painting.

The important thing is to remember what most impressed you and to put it on canvas as fast as possible.

I seldom have my stuff up unless I'm testing it. If I'm worrying about a painting, I put it up and see if I detest it quickly or slowly. Otherwise I have things by other artists.

Every artist is supposed to get emotional. You're painting pictures of emotions.

I love creating images, of course, because I'm an artist.

I have a strange relationship with influences because mine are mostly literary or painters or poets, who I'll even quote. I don't do tributes to cinema.